KP

My son likes me to recite poetry at bedtime. I can’t do The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere without crying at the end. “In the hour of darkness, peril, and need, people will awaken and listen to hear the hurrrying hoofbeats of that steed and the midnight message of Paul Revere.”

I hate Mothers Day. It’s exactly like every other day except I have to pretend to be grateful. This year my husband’s gift to me was going to be the candle his mom gave me for Mothers Day last year. Couldn’t stand the smell while pregnant so I gave it to him. You can’t make this shit up.

Stop calling it “weaponized” incompetence. It’s just straight up incompetence fueled by a misogyny that says “It doesn’t matter if I fail at a domestic task because it’s women’s work and therefore has no value.”

Me to my baby: “Oh my god, just latch, why are you hitting my boob and shaking your head around my breast with your tongue out?!”

Me trying to get the soft ice to come out of the hard ice in the mason jar: “Maybe if I stuck my tongue out and hit the glass while shaking my head I’d get what I want!”

When I was a baby the doctor looked at me and said, “That’s the haole-est haole I ever saw” and I have definitely lost my title as evidenced by this pic.

After 13 years I’m finally using my fancy expensive masters degrees…to mend my kids’ board books. I really did love my Preservation courses, so it is genuinely pleasant to be able to apply the skills I learned there, at long last.

And Jesus fucking christ, learn how to approach a home. You don’t walk up to the door and knock, you stand at the bottom of the porch steps and yell “Hui!” before you even think about walking up. Give people some warning. “Hui” is the doorbell here. Just fucking learn, fucking colonizers.

If you can’t be fucked to learn how to pronounce a new language when you move somewhere, don’t fucking move there. Say “Mamalahoa Highway”, say “Kalanianaole”, say “Kanoelehua”, for fucks sake say “Hawai’i Belt Road”. Just respect the place you are.

Today I learned from a 14-year transplant that the reason the rest of the transplants say “Highway 11” or “Highway 200” or whatever is because they can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce the Hawaiian names for the major roads they’re driving on. I have no idea what either of those numbers mean.

Stop telling me about studies with n=16 when we have an administration that’ll never let us have wider scale trials of anything helpful. Our health advice in this country is now “Take unregulated supplements and make randos more billions!”

So far my favorite part of having a NB and toddler was when my husband had to go away for twelve days and half way through my brain broke. I thought it was PPP. It was dehydration. I was hallucinating. Not fun.

I have two tenets that I live by. The first is, “My life has no meaning except in helping others” and the second is, “All you can do is your best, so do it.”

Go do it.

New mom’s math at 39: same, but I also get to wake up to nurse when I’d just fallen asleep and try not to fall asleep again. Getting older is so much fun!

“and then [Hitler began] systematically eliminating everyone who got in his way, including all of the intelligentsia. And, of course, the Jews. Virginia Woolf had been on the ‘elimination’ list, and so had Laurence Olivier and C. P. Snow. And T. S. Eliot.”

We’re seeing this now.

to think logically. With literacy rates what they are (the latest number I heard is 48% aren’t reading at a sixth grade level in the US) I think there’s clear evidence that what we’re seeing here are the long acting reactions against school integration, among other things.

This is the result of sixty years of deliberately underfunding public education. I said this to a friend who took it to mean I think everyone should have a liberal arts degree, which I emphatically don’t, but I do believe everyone should receive a free education that leaves them literate and able

On heroes, from the book I read in times of crisis:
“I’m studying ordinary people who you wouldn’t expect to be heroic, but who, when there’s a crisis, show extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice.”

Also, that’s really not very much money. That’s “Someone you know who has money but is quiet about it” money. That is not “Government contract audit” money. These people are just randomly searching and burning things to the ground. That’s like the salt under your fingers after you under salt a dish.

I have two babies. All I can think to do is plant my garden, read my book, and call my reps in the morning. I’m sorry, I don’t know what else I can do.

The books I read when the world is spinning out are Black Out/All Clear by @conniewillisdotnet.bsky.social and I have two babies who are part Jewish so I’m reading very carefully this time. I don’t know what to do to resist with literally a babe in arms, but I’m trying.

My background is history, specifically disease history, but I spent a long time in early 20c Euro hist because the professor was great (and later my advisor), and all I’m saying is I’m getting my very young part-Jewish kids passports ASAP. We’ve seen this before. Be ready to move.

I am resurfacing seven weeks postpartum after a horrific birth experience that was not medically necessary and all I want to know is: what can I do (with a newborn strapped to me and a toddler screaming for me)?

When I was nine I moved from a town that was 1.9 square miles (.77m of that water, pop. 4K in 2020) to one that was 58 square miles (just over 4m of that water, pop. 44k). The fact that both places are considered small towns blows me away. It’s easy to designate a city, but a small town is different